The Queen's Gambit

Why wasn’t Wheatley telling her this?
Wheatley’s embarrassment made her somehow squirm for him, as though
she were embarrassed herself. “I thought I could keep the house if I made
the payments,” she said.
“Mr. Wheatley says you misconstrued him.”
Why was her lawyer speaking for him? Why couldn’t he get his own
lawyer, for Christ’s sake? She looked over at him and saw he was lighting a
cigarette, his face still inclined away from her, a pained look on his features.
“He claims he was only permitting you to stay in the house until you got
settled.”
“That’s not true,” Beth said. “He said I could have it…” Suddenly
something hit her with full force and she turned to Wheatley. “I’m your
daughter,” she said. “You adopted me. Why don’t you talk to me?”
He looked at her like a startled rabbit. “Alma,” he said, “Alma wanted a
child…”
“You signed the papers,” Beth said. “You took on a responsibility. Can’t
you even look at me?”
Allston Wheatley stood up and walked across the room to the window.
When he turned around, he had somehow pulled himself together, and he
looked furious. “Alma wanted to adopt you. Not me. You’re not entitled to
everything I own just because I signed some damned papers to shut Alma
up.” He turned back to the window. “Not that it worked.”
“You adopted me,” Beth said. “I didn’t ask you to do it.” She felt a
choking sensation in her throat. “You’re my legal father.”
When he turned and looked at her, she was shocked to see how contorted
his face was. “The money in this house is mine, and no smart-assed orphan
is going to take it away from me.”
“I’m not an orphan,” Beth said. “I’m your daughter.”
“Not in my book you aren’t. I don’t give a shit what your god-damned
lawyer says. I don’t give a shit what Alma said either. That woman could
not keep her mouth shut.”
No one spoke for a while. Finally Chennault asked quietly, “What do you
want from Beth, Mr. Wheatley?”

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“I want her out of here. I’m selling the house.”
Beth looked at him for a moment before speaking. “Then sell it to me,”
she said.
“What are you talking about?” Wheatley said.
“I’ll buy it. I’ll pay you whatever your equity is.”
“It’s worth more than that now.”
“How much more?”
“I’d need seven thousand.”
She knew his equity was less than five. “All right,” she said.
“You have that much?”
“Yes,” she said. “But I’m subtracting what I paid for burying my mother.
I’ll show you the receipts.”
Allston Wheatley sighed like a martyr. “All right,” he said. “You two can
draw up the papers. I’m going back to the hotel.” He walked over to the
door. “It’s too hot in here.”
“You could have taken off your coat,” Beth said.
***
It left her two thousand in the bank. She didn’t like having so little, but it
was all right. In the mail there had been invitations to play in two strong
tournaments, with good prize money. Fifteen hundred for one and two
thousand for the other. And there was the heavy envelope from Russia,
inviting her to Moscow in July.
When she got back with her copy of the signed papers she walked around
the living room several times, passing her hand lightly over pieces of
furniture. Wheatley hadn’t said anything about the furniture, but it was hers.
She had asked the lawyer. Wheatley hadn’t even shown up, and Chennault
took the papers over to the Phoenix Hotel for him to sign while she waited
in the office and read a National Geographic. The house felt different, now
that it was hers. She would get some new pieces—a good, low sofa and two
small modern armchairs. She could visualize them, with pale-blue linen
upholstery and darker blue piping. Not Mrs. Wheatley blue, but her own.
Beth blue. She wanted things brighter in the living room, more cheerful.
She wanted to erase Mrs. Wheatley’s half-real presence from the place. She
would get a bright rug for the floor and have the windows washed. She

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would get a stereo and some records, a new bedspread and pillowcases for
the bed upstairs. From Purcell’s. Mrs. Wheatley had been a good mother;
she had not intended to die and leave her.
***
Beth slept well and awoke feeling angry. She put on the chenille robe and
padded downstairs in slippers—Mrs. Wheatley’s slippers—and found
herself thinking furiously of the seven thousand dollars she had paid Allston
Wheatley. She loved her money; she and Mrs. Wheatley had both taken
great pleasure in accumulating it from tournament to tournament, watching
it gather interest. They had always opened Beth’s bank statements together
to see how much new interest had been credited to the account. And after
Mrs. Wheatley’s death it had consoled her to know that she could go on
living in the house, buying her groceries at the supermarket and going to
movies when she wanted to without feeling pinched for money or having to
think about getting work or going to college or finding tournaments to win.
She had brought three of Benny’s chess pamphlets with her from New
York; while her eggs were boiling she set up her board on the kitchen table
and got out the booklet with games from the last Moscow Invitational. The
Russian booklets were printed on expensive paper with good, clear type.
She had not really mastered Russian from the night course at the university,
but she could read the names and the notations easily enough. Yet the
Cyrillic characters were irritating. It angered her that the Soviet government
put so much money into chess, and that they even used a different alphabet
from hers. When the eggs were done, she peeled them into a bowl with
butter and began playing a game between Petrosian and Tal. Grünfeld
Defense. Semi-Slav Variation. She got it to the black king knight on queen
two for the eighth move and then became bored with it. She had been
moving the pieces too fast for analysis, not stopping herself as Benny would
have made her do to trace out everything that was going on. She finished
the last spoonful of egg and went out the back door into the garden.
It was a hot morning. The grass in the yard was overgrown, it nearly
covered the little brick pathway that went to where some shabby tea roses
stood. She went back into the house and played the white rook to queen one
and then stared at it. She did not want to study chess. That was frightening;

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a vast amount of study lay ahead of her if she wanted to avoid humiliation
in Moscow. She pushed down the fear and went upstairs for a shower. As
she dried her hair, she saw with a kind of relief that she needed to have it
cut. That would be something to do today. Afterward she could go to
Purcell’s and look at sofas for the living room. But it wouldn’t be wise to
buy—not until she had more money. And how could she get the lawn
mowed? A boy had done it for Mrs. Wheatley, but she didn’t know his
telephone number or address.
She needed to clean up the place. There were cobwebs and messy-
looking sheets and pillowcases. She could use some new ones. Some new
clothes, too. Harry Beltik had left his razor in the bathroom; should she mail
it back? The milk had gone sour and the butter was old. The freezer was full
of ice crystals with a stack of old frozen chicken dinners stuck in the back.
The bedroom rug was dusty, and the windows had fingerprints on the glass
and grit on the sills.
Beth shook the confusion out of her head as well as she could and made
an appointment with Roberta for a haircut at two. She would ask where to
find a cleaning woman for a few weeks. She would go to Morris’s, order
some chess books, and have lunch at Toby’s.
But her usual clerk wasn’t at Morris’s that day, and the woman who had
replaced him knew nothing about ordering chess books. Beth managed to
get her to find a catalogue and ordered three on the Sicilian Defense. She
needed game books from grandmaster matches and Chess Informants. But
she didn’t know which Yugoslav press published Chess Informant, and
neither did the new clerk. It was infuriating. She needed a library as good as
Benny’s. Better. Thinking of this, she finally realized angrily that she could
go back to New York and forget all this confusion and continue with Benny
from where she had left off. But what could Benny teach her now? What
could any American teach her? She had moved past them all. She was on
her own. She would have to bridge the gap herself that separated American
chess from Russian.
At Toby’s the headwaiter knew her and put her at a good table near the
front. She ordered asperges vinaigrette for an appetizer and told the waiter
she would have that before ordering a main course. “Would you care for a
cocktail?” he asked pleasantly. She looked around her at the quiet
restaurant, at the people eating lunch, at the table with desserts near the

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velvet rope at the entrance to the dining room. “A Gibson,” she said. “On
the rocks.”
It came almost immediately. It was wonderful to look at. The tumbler
was clear and clean; the gin inside was crystalline; the white onions were
like two pearls. When she tasted it, it stung her upper lip, then stung her
throat with a sweet tease as it went down. The effect on her tense stomach
was remarkable; everything about it was rewarding. She finished it slowly,
and the deep fury in her began to subside. She ordered another. Back in the
shadows at the far end of the room someone was playing a piano. Beth
looked at her watch. It was a quarter to twelve. It was good to be alive.
She never got around to ordering the main course. She came out of
Toby’s at two, squinting into the sunshine, and jaywalked across Main to
David Manly’s Wine Shop. Using two of her traveler’s checks from Ohio
she bought a case of Paul Masson burgundy, four bottles of Gordon’s gin
and a bottle of Martini & Rossi vermouth and had Mr. Manly call her a taxi.
Her speech was clear and sharp; her gait was steady. She had eaten six
stalks of asparagus and drunk four Gibsons. She had flirted with alcohol for
years. It was time to consummate the relationship.
The phone was ringing when she came in, but she did not answer it. The
driver helped her with the case of wine, and she tipped him a dollar. When
he had left, she got the bottles out one at a time and put them neatly into the
cabinet over the toaster, in front of Mrs. Wheatley’s old cans of spaghetti
and chili. Then she opened a bottle of gin and twisted the cap off the
vermouth. She had never made a cocktail before. She poured gin into the
tumbler and added a little vermouth, stirring it with one of Mrs. Wheatley’s
spoons. She carried the drink carefully into the living room, sat down and
took a long swallow.
***
The mornings were horrible, but she managed them. She went to Kroger’s
on the third day and bought three dozen eggs and a supply of TV dinners.
After that she always had two eggs before her first glass of wine. By noon
she had usually passed out. She would awake on the sofa or in a chair with
her limbs stiff and the back of her neck damp with hot sweat. Sometimes,
her head reeling, she would feel in the depth of her stomach an anger as

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intense as the pain of a burst abscess in the jaw—a toothache so potent that
nothing but drink could alleviate it. Sometimes the drink had to be forced
against a rejection of it by her body, but she did it. She would get it down
and wait and the feelings would subside a bit. It was like turning down the
volume.
On Saturday morning she spilled wine on her kitchen chessboard, and on
Monday she bumped into the table by accident and sent some of the pieces
falling to the floor. She left them there, picking them up only on Thursday,
when finally the young man came by to mow the lawn. She lay on the sofa
drinking from the last bottle in her case and listened to the roaring of his
power mower, smelling the grass cuttings. When she had paid him, she
went outside into the grass smell and looked at the lawn with its clumps of
cuttings. It touched her to see it so altered, so changed from what it had
been. She went back in, got her purse and called a cab. The law did not
permit deliveries of wine or liquor. She would have to get another case on
her own. Two would be smarter. And she would try Almadén. Someone had
said Almadén burgundy was better than Paul Masson. She would try it.
Maybe a few bottles of white wine, too. And she needed food.
Lunches came from a can. The chili was pretty good if you added pepper
and ate it with a glass of burgundy. Almadén was better than Paul Masson,
less astringent on the tongue. The Gibsons, though, could hit her like a club,
and she became wary of them, saving them until just before passing out or,
sometimes, for the first drink in the morning. By the third week she was
taking a Gibson up to bed with her on the nights she made it upstairs to bed.
She put it on the nightstand with a Chess Informant over it to keep the
alcohol from evaporating, and drank it when she woke up in the middle of
the night. Or if not then, in the morning, before going downstairs.
Sometimes the phone rang, but she answered it only when her head and
voice were clear. She always spoke aloud to check her level of sobriety
before picking up the receiver. She would say, “Peter Piper picked a peck of
pickled peppers,” and if it came out all right, she would take up the phone.
A woman called from New York, wanting her on the Tonight Show. She
refused.
It wasn’t until her third week of drinking that she went through the pile of
magazines that had come while she was in New York and found the